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Last saturday saw the 2nd meet of Social Media Club’s Delhi chapter and I along with Dipankar Sarkar spoke about our experiences and learnings from Building a Global Social Product(Kwippy) out of India.

I personally was quite excited about the talk as we generally don’t talk about products much in the regular Twitter, Bloggers and other Social Media related meets and I feel this is something that we should do often to create awareness amongst the attendees and if possible encourage people to build new products.

Talking about web products they can be categorized into two categories, “Innovation” (a completely new concept, first of its kind) and “Improvisation” ( a slight modification in an innovative idea and/or a slight modification in its implementation). From what I’ve observed most social web products in India belog to the “Improvisation” category with focus on the Indian market. Be it a social network, a platform to share pictures or microblog.

Though there is nothing wrong in improvising on someone’s concept and building a product for the local market but I guess most of the products in this segment fail to add any substantial value to the concept or it’s localised execution. Also, what makes me wonder is why there aren’t many popular Indian web products in other categories particularly Global products based on an Innovative concept(from India) and Global products based on Improvisation(from India) of some innovative concept.

I feel there’s a lot of scope in both Made in India, for India and Made in India for World categories and I would keep a close watch for products in these two categories and now that I have moved out of Kwippy(will detail out in a seperate post) maybe work on something myself sometime soon 🙂

Just wanted to share that kwippy.com, India’s premier conversational platform was covered in yesterday’s Economic Times. For the uninitiated Economic Times is India’s Leading Business Newspaper run by Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd. This is the first reference of Kwippy in mainstream Print Media. Here’s the complete news item.

Our chat bot is about an year old and has been running quite smoothly. The bot support the following functionality

We all love reading books and talking about them but at times we just cant get ourselves to read regularly or find someone to discuss the books we just read with. Keeping this thing in mind and kwippy’s wonderful conversational abilities, we’ve started a book club at kwippy. The concept is simple, a bunch of people mutually decide on a book, give it a read and share their views/opinions about it. The slight difference is that instead of discussing books in person, we’ll be talking about them online on kwippy. This will not only help us have better organized conversations but also to involve more people from across the world.

What better book to start the kwippy book club than Milan Kundera’s – The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

If you are into books, you are most welcome to join the book club. All you need to do is request for a kwippy invite here and start following the conversation thread mentioned below. In case you want an invite for kwippy, you can also drop a comment below

I’ve been thinking, I’ve been wanting and I’ve been trying but with no avail.

I am talking about my relationship with “Google Reader“. As much as I love reading blogs I’ve never really got too much into using RSS readers to follow blogs I like. That said, I started using Google Reader more actively a couple of months back, reading posts, sharing them and even favoriting some(do you actually go back and read what you starred ?). Things were fine till I was just following 5-7 blogs but once that number crossed a dozen, things started becoming difficult. I know, anything less than 40-50 blogs on the RSS reader is not a problem with many and some can even manage reading(or just manage) 100’s of blogs in their reader but incidentally “reading blogs” is not that only thing I do and thus have a problem keeping track of large number of blogs and using another tool for it all together.

I happened to skip checking out my reader for a weekend(while out of station) and had a really tough time getting back following it regularly. While I was not doing any good at being regular reading post from blogs I like and the things my friends share this happened. I’ve made good friends with my gtalk and gotten it to do all sortsofthings thanks to our kwippy gtalk bot. It’s been a regular affair now to check my google reader once-twice a week and to quickly glance through the new items and the way things are going I have a hunch that despite all its goodness I might just have to stop using it all together as now I can get new posts from blogs I like or what’s being said about social media marketing on twitter delivered straight to my gtalk which is nothing short of spectacular.

Twitter’s Track feature was one of the features which could easily classify as the “Holy Grail” of microblogging. Ever since it was released people loved it and couldn’t get enough of it. Tracking keywords that you care about and getting tweets containing them on your IM(and mobile) was simply terrific. But then like all the good things Track too came to an end. Folks at identi.ca tried doing track but that too ran into some issues and thus had to be taken down.
For those who’ve missed tracking twitter on their gtalk there’s a good news. We at kwippy have found a way around to track twitter via gtalk, just like before. So be it your field of interest, the film you like most or simply your name, now you can get notifications on your gtalk everytime somebody mentions them on twitter.

How it works ?:
Summize/Twitter search gives an atom feed for search results which can be integrated to kwippy, which has the ability to send updates/kwips via gtalk. Which means everytime the feed gets refreshed with new search results
the people who are following the user on gtalk will get the kwip.

If you like kwippy and what we are doing please nominate us for MashableOpen Web Awards. All you need to do is to just enter your email id in the form below and click the link in confirmation email that you’ll get. Come on guys show your support. Also, just drop a comment below if you vote.

TATA along with NEN have started a competition for India’s hottest startup. TATA is one of the biggest and most respected companies of India and for the uninitiated NEN( National Entrepreneurship Network) is a non-profit organization, and India’s leader in entrepreneurship education. The nominations for the contest are open till 22nd October 08 and 30 shortlisted startups will be announced on 6th Nov 08 which will again be open for public votes and five winners would be announced on 23rd December 08 { Yes, it’s far 🙂 }.

Even before we got to know of these awards in detail somebody told us that Kwippy has been nominated. Thanks a lot to those who nominated kwippy. Its been a few days since kwippy started showing up on the awards website but amid the hussle n bussle of action on kwippy it kinda slipped our minds. It was when I logged in to the awards site to see if we’ve got any votes I found that not only we’ve got some 20 votes without us really doing anything to make people aware also that we are ranked 47(not bad I’d say). Given the fact that there’s quite some time left and we can let people know about this, am sure kwippy can do much much better.

If you’ve liked kwippy even a bit or you’ve know anyone from the team please go ahead and vote for kwippy 🙂